SENSE4US

Dear readers,

Sense4us project has successfully completed the first of its three-year course. In this period, we have made great progress into researching and developing the tools that will assist policy-makers in their difficult task. The Sense4us toolbox that is being developed (Theme Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Linked Open Data Search and Policy Impact Analysis) is being presented by project partners in meetings and interviews with policy-makers. At the same time, the Consortium has a steady presence in many scientific conferences both in Europe and at international level. An overwhelming number of papers have been published by the Consortium partners over the last few months, the quality of which doesn’t go unnoticed, as they get high acceptance and “best paper award” by the scientific community!

We will continue to work with the same zest and enthusiasm in the future as well!

If you have any comments or suggestions, we will be more than glad to receive them, so please feel free to contact us at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Enjoy the reading!

The Sense4us Dissemination and Communication Team

Demonstrating Sense4us to policy makers

Sense4us partner Gesis has participated in the “Leibniz meets Parliament” event in early December. In the event, Gesis presented the project and did live demonstration of the Sense4us tools to the MPs that were participating. The reactions of the MPs were very positive. MP Hans Feuß was very interested in what was presented; he mentioned that "its an important tool for the daily work of politicians". MP Torsten Sommer was very enthusiastic and said “it’s a great tool with lots of potential“.
Gesis has initiated an interesting and fruitful discussion with the MPs and this will be continued in the upcoming months.

Sense4us project partner KMi wins Best Paper Award

Our project partner Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) won the Best Paper Award at the Semantic Sentiment analysis Workshop, ESWC 2014 that took place in Crete, Greece! The paper Adapting Sentiment Lexicons using Contextual Semantics for Sentiment Analysis of Twitter was written by Saif, H., He, Y., Fernandez, M. and Alani, H. (2014)

Sense4us has strong presence in world conferences

Sense4us project worked on scientific papers submission in various important conferences in Europe and at international level. Lately, the project published papers and organized workshops and tutorials in conferences like the 11th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC – Crete, Greece), the 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC – Riva del Garda, Trentino Italy), the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL – Baltimore, USA, the European Conference on Social Media (ECSM – Brighton UK) and the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC – Reykjavik, Iceland).

Commission Priority: Climate Action and Energy

“We need to pool our resources, combine our infrastructures and unite our negotiating power with third countries.” President Juncker’s political guidelines.

Europe relies too heavily on fuel and gas imports. We need to reduce this dependency while keeping our energy market open to countries outside the EU.

We owe it to future generations to limit the impact of climate change and to keep energy affordable – by using more energy from renewable sources and becoming more energy efficient.

Objectives

• Creating a European Energy Union – by pooling resources, connecting networks and uniting our power when negotiating with non EU countries.
• Diversifying our energy sources – so Europe can quickly switch to other supply channels if the financial or political cost of importing from the East becomes too high.
• Helping EU countries become less dependent on energy imports.
• Making the EU the world number one in renewable energy and leading the fight against global warming.

Full text from President Juncker’s Political Guidelines

2030 framework for climate and energy policies

EU leaders agreed on 23 October 2014 the domestic 2030 greenhouse gas reduction target of at least 40% compared to 1990 together with the other main building blocks of the 2030 policy framework for climate and energy, as proposed by the European Commission in January 2014. This 2030 policy framework aims to make the European Union's economy and energy system more competitive, secure and sustainable and also sets a target of at least 27% for renewable energy and energy savings by 2030.

While the EU is making good progress towards meeting its climate and energy targets for 2020, an integrated policy framework for the period up to 2030 is needed to ensure regulatory certainty for investors and a coordinated approach among Member States.

The framework presented will drive continued progress towards a low-carbon economy. It aims to build a competitive and secure energy system that ensures affordable energy for all consumers, increases the security of the EU's energy supplies, reduces our dependence on energy imports and creates new opportunities for growth and jobs.

More information at the EC’s EU Action for 2030 page

The Internet of Things: the case for public voice

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes several technologies that enable the internet to reach out into the real world of physical objects to create a global infrastructure where machines, household appliances, clothing and virtually all things we use and wear communicate with each other online.

It is impossible to anticipate all the social implications that might flow from these new forms of connectivity between devices. How these will manifest themselves is not yet clear and will depend upon uncertain innovation and societal choices. The importance of the IoT will depend heavily on up-take by individuals, businesses and governments, all influenced by public perceptions of benefits and risks. In this respect, early involvement of the public can help both technology developers and policy makers to understand and respond to public interests and concerns, while balancing out the benefits and risks for both individuals and society at large.

Read the full report here

Simulation for Policy Inquiry

Public policy and management problems have been described as poorly defined, messy, squishy, unstructured, intractable, and wicked. In a word, they are complex. This book illustrates the development and use of simulation models designed to capture some of the complexity inherent in the formulation, management, and implementation of policies aimed at addressing such problems.

Find more about this book